Help Please

I was recently gifted a huge lot of movie posters from my dads friend. He owned a video store and literally kept every poster he was ever sent. Starts in the late 70's and goes up until 2010 when he sold the store.

Any help from the forum would be greatly appreciated. I have 3 main questions.

Are video store posters worth much?

i was reading that it is the ones in the theatre that catch a big price. These were all sent to the store free for promotional use.

next question.

How should I store them?

They are all rolled up with about 10 in each. He had them stored upright when I collected them. I feel this will damage the edges and am thinking I should put them on their side. i would love to tube each of them but from my estimation there are probably 7000 of them there and that's a heck of a lot of tubs lol.

Last question

if movie store posters are worth anything, should I sell them as a lot or individually?

i will definetly pick out some of my fave movies to keep but the sheer number is a bit overwhelming. There are a ton of titles I don't know and I have no idea how to appraise them.

thank you for any input you may have for this new to poster collecting noob.

Most video posters aren't worth much but there is a market for early material, particularly horror movies. Some of my favorite posters are lurid video horror images from the 1980s so if you have any of those i'd be keen.

I have started on a list and am lucky he wrote the name date and lead rolls on every tube.

Unfortunatly they are all held with rubber bands currently. He wrapped them all tightly so it seems they haven't left damage. I fear once I untie them it will be kaos. The collection is already taking a very large chunk of the basement.

Guess I better take a week off work, hunker down and invintory them. Can't really know what they are worth until I know what's there.

What is the best way to find their value?

I have visited HA it seems the best because it shows past sales. Also looked on movieposters.com but seems really retail.and the sold items on eBay

There are a bunch of horror for sure. My personal favourites so far have been the Re-Animator, the Evil Dead and Return of the Living Dead. Those stuck out because I watched them back in the day.

There are very few duplicates so going through them is a ton of fun. It seems like every movie I've ever seen is there.

Grab a roll and I'm like don't know for first 6 titles then boom close encounters of the third kind or goonies or roger rabbit.

Oh there were also a bunch of hard backed posters too. They are on particle board and some are on foam board. The foam ones are numbered on the back and some have a halogram as well. They are all in original plastic. Ace Ventura: when nature calls, Transpotting, the Client, Tales From the Hood are what I can remember.

Also check emovieposter.com but you have to join (free) to view the auction history details much like Heritage.

Don't go off the value of the theatrical releases though...they are treated very differently by collectors, but it sounds like you have found and will find many more great titles, so in the end you should do ok for something you got for nothing

Be careful about investing too much time into this project. Depending on what you earn a week, forgoing a week's salary might be investing more than what they are worth. And the work involved in selling them might yield you far less per hour than you make at your job.

Of course, if you love organizing them, and view it as "fun", then go for it! And do post pictures here of what you think might be some of the "best" ones.

and once you cherry pick the favorites, be honest with the buyer and don't expect much if anything for the remainder.

Several times now I have gone to view "a large collection of movie posters" only to find video posters with all the good titles removed. Adding a thousand video posters with unrecognizable titles will not help my collection, so I have always passed and felt I lost an hour or 2 of my life.

When I was a younger I used to ask if I could go through the collection and was always nicely told no. This is maybe why the collection was gifted to me. I was always as excited as my dads friend about the collection. So really the week off work will be very enjoyable for me.

Funny that the video store posters that hold value are the b rate horrors. It is probably my favourite genera next to 80's fantasy.

For sure I will keep in mind that the picked through lot will be virtually worthless. Maybe I can sort collections by actor or theme and sell them 10 at a time after. When it comes to that point I'll keep sure not to waste anyone's time.

I wonder though, with the death of video stores maybe sitting on these for a spell might be a good move?

I am in my mid 30's and the video store nostalgia makes the posters more desirable to me personally as I truly miss the movie store experience. As my generation ages they might become more collectable.

I am excited to get a list and some pictures for you all to check out. Below are pics of the lot. I am buying shelves today to get them up off the floor.

I was having a discussion with a friend the other day and he seems to think that video posters will eventually start to become desirable to collectors due to the nostalgia for video stores. I am skeptical of this myself, but I have seen a few select pieces of video paper sell for decent on eBay. Personally, they don't interest me.

If they DO become valuable one day, I'll be upset, as I worked in video stores all through the late 80s/early 90s and did not keep any of my old vid posters from back then as I was already a 'purist', lol.

As a horror / exploitation fan, I have bought many old video posters when I've had the chance. Often the video posters feature different (and sometimes better) art to theatrical release posters. With the crazy censorship Australia experienced in the 60s and 70s, many great trashy films never saw a cinema release and a video poster is the only way to own a poster for these films.

Posters for VHS companies like Video Classics and Palace Explosive are very desirable to me :-)

One thing I'm surprised didn't become collectible after the video store era were standees. I have very rarely seen them for sale, and I know during the late 80s I had dozens of them at one point. I guess it's really an issue of storage practicality; you'd need a good amount of space to store any number of them, which is why I quit. Well, that and losing the video store job...